A critical path package is a specially managed package in Fedora that provides some essential or core functionality. Updates for critical path packages must undergo additional verification before they can be distributed to the community at large.

Contents

Background

Previously, documented policy treated every package the same. While good for uniformity, in reality certain packages require extra attention and care when updating and testing. These packages have potential to break the critical path of use of our Fedora distribution. As part of a Fedora Activity Day, several contributors proposed a critical set of actions that must not be broken. The packages required to sustain these actions make up the critical path.

Actions

Packages within the critical path are required to perform the most fundamental actions on a system. Those actions include:

graphical network install

post-install booting

decrypt encrypted filesystems

graphics

login

networking

get updates

minimal buildroot

compose new trees

compose live

Implementation

A set of groups are defined in the comps.xml file to include packages required for the critical use cases listed above. Since package dependencies change regularly, the comps.xml groups are then used to dynamically generate the list of packages.